631113
research-article2016
PSSXXX10.1177/0956797616631113Roediger, DeSotoRecognizing the Presidents
Psychological Science OnlineFirst, published on April 4, 2016 as doi:10.1177/0956797616631113
Research Article
Recognizing the Presidents: Was
Alexander Hamilton President?
Psychological Science
1 ­–7
© The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0956797616631113
pss.sagepub.com
Henry L. Roediger, III, and K. Andrew DeSoto
Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis
Abstract
Studies over the past 40 years have shown that Americans can recall about half the U.S. presidents. Do people know
the presidents even though they are unable to access them for recall? We investigated this question using the powerful
cues of a recognition test. Specifically, we tested the ability of 326 online subjects to recognize U.S. presidents when
presented with their full names among various types of lures. The hit rate for presidential recognition was .88, well
above the proportion produced in free recall but far from perfect. Presidents Franklin Pierce and Chester Arthur were
recognized less than 60% of the time. Interestingly, four nonpresidents were falsely recognized at relatively high rates,
and Alexander Hamilton was more frequently identified as president than were several actual presidents. Even on a
recognition test, knowledge of American presidents is imperfect and prone to error. The false alarm data support the
theory that false fame can arise from contextual familiarity.
Keywords
recognition, presidents, false fame, familiarity, collective memory, open data, open materials
Received 9/10/15; Revision accepted 1/14/16
The emerging study of collective memory, defined as a
form of a memory shared by a group and central to identity of the group’s members (e.g., Corning & Schuman,
2015; Olick & Robbins, 1998; Wertsch & Roediger, 2008),
has enjoyed increasing interest from historians, sociologists, philosophers, and other scholars. Recently, psychologists have joined the study of collective memory using
their empirical techniques (Hirst & Manier, 2008; Roediger
& Abel, 2015). In the research reported here, we investigated recognition of names of individuals who served as
American presidents. Virtually all Americans know the
leader of their country, and being able to recall the current president is often used as a quick indicator of neurological health following a head injury.
A central component of collective identity is a group’s
leader, a person who is often viewed with pride but
sometimes with fear, embarrassment, or even shame
(e.g., Schwartz, 1991, 1997). In the United States, the
presidents serve as an entry point for empirical study of
such collective knowledge. Roediger and Crowder (1976)
first tested college students’ ability to recall presidents
and found that students could recall 62% of them. They
showed that subjects’ recall produced a standard serial
position curve with large primacy and recency effects.
The theoretical conclusions of the study have been disputed, but the general findings have always been replicated (e.g., Crowder, 1993; Healy, Havas, & Parker, 2000;
Healy & Parker, 2001; Kelley, Neath, & Surprenant, 2013;
Neath, 2010; Roediger & DeSoto, 2014): In every era in
which presidential recall has been measured, only about
half of the presidents have been recalled. Other studies
have shown similar types of forgetting for public knowledge that was well known at one time (Fu, Xue, DeSoto,
& Yuan, 2016; Rubin, 1998, 2014).
Students in the United States take American history in
high school, so they are probably exposed to the names
of the presidents at that point, even though they may not
study all of them in great detail. The fact that they can
Corresponding Author:
Henry L. Roediger, III, Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences,
Washington University in St. Louis, Campus Box 1125, One Brookings
Dr., St. Louis, MO 63130
E-mail: [email protected]
Downloaded from pss.sagepub.com by John Nestojko on April 19, 2016
Roediger, DeSoto
2
recall only about half the presidents while in college
might then be attributed to difficulty in accessing information that is available in memory (Tulving & Pearlstone,
1966); people may know more than they can recall during a 5-min test (W. Brown, 1923).
One way of assessing knowledge more sensitively is
through the use of recognition tests. In a study of recognition of word lists, Murdock (1968) claimed that standard recognition procedures “obviated the need for
retrieval of the item” (p. 85) and provided a more direct
measure of the availability of memories than did recall
measures. However, an exception was found when Tulving and Thomson (1973) discovered that, in some circumstances, people can recall words that cannot be
recognized. They showed that after studying word pairs
such as glue-CHAIR with instructions to remember the
word in all capitals, subjects often failed to recognize that
chair had been in the list but when later cued with glue
were able to recall chair.
This outcome might seem far removed from recall and
recognition of presidents, but Muter (1978) showed that
the same outcome occurred in recall of famous names.
That is, when asked to recognize surnames of people
who were famous before 1950, subjects frequently failed
to recognize names such as Morton or Young as being
famous. Yet when given cues that did not include the
surname (e.g., “U.S. jazz composer and pianist: Jelly Roll
______” or “U.S. Latter Day Saint leader: Brigham
______”), they could recall the famous people named
Morton and Young. Mindful of this outcome, in the current study, we included both given names and surnames
of presidents (e.g., Zachary Taylor rather than Taylor) to
permit greater access to available memories, although we
certainly cannot claim that this recognition method provides a pure measure of availability of the contents of
memory (no measure of memory does).
In the current study, we asked workers from Amazon
Mechanical Turk (MTurk; see Chandler & Shapiro, 2016)
to recognize the names of 41 U.S. presidents presented
along with 82 lures. Subjects also rated their confidence
in the recognition decisions they made. The lures
included vice presidents of the United States who did not
become president, other famous Americans, and other
names, including some typical Anglo-Saxon names (e.g.,
Thomas Moore).
We predicted that our subjects would recognize presidents much better than they could recall them, but that
recognition for many presidents from the 1800s would be
low (in the least favorable part of the serial position
curve, where recall is lowest; Roediger & DeSoto, 2014).
We also predicted that some famous Americans who
were not presidents would be recognized as presidents
on the basis of the strong familiarity of their names. This
prediction arose from research on false fame in a
fame-judgment task developed by Jacoby, Kelley, Brown,
and Jasechko (1989). They argued that familiarity of a
name in a given context, unopposed by recollection of
actual events, could result in an attribution of fame to the
person so named. Jacoby, Kelley, et al.’s work was conducted using a list-learning paradigm, and we attempted
to extend it to a naturalistic setting in which the targets
and some lures referred to famous people. Our hypothesis was that subjects might falsely recognize some
famous Americans (e.g., Benjamin Franklin) as presidents
when familiarity with the name provided a strong signal
of fame that was unopposed by recollection of the person’s actual role in history.
Method
Subjects
Three hundred ninety-two subjects began the study,
which was conducted online via MTurk. Out of those
subjects, 62 did not complete the study, and 4 others
indicated that they had used external sources while completing the task. These 66 subjects were therefore
excluded, which left a total of 326. This sample size was
much greater than in most similar studies using recall
measures and college-student subjects. In the final sample, 168 subjects were women, 156 were men, and 2 did
not indicate gender. Average age was 36.0 years (SD =
12.4, minimum = 18, maximum = 75). Only subjects who
reported that they were within the United States were
permitted to participate, although we did not ask whether
they were U.S. citizens. The study took subjects about 16
min to complete.
Materials
Materials were 123 first and last names (e.g., Thomas Jefferson) of both presidents and nonpresidents. Individuals
were referred to by full, given first names and not nicknames (e.g., James Carter, not Jimmy Carter). The list of
presidents contained 41 of the 43 presidents. We included
the names John Adams and George Bush (father-son
pairs with the same name) only once.
The list of nonpresidents comprised 82 names, which
means that one third of the test consisted of targets. We
included more lures than targets to encourage a conservative criterion, in an attempt to deter subjects from simply identifying all famous names as belonging to
presidents. We created the list of lures by combining vice
presidents who did not become president with other
famous names from American history (e.g., political or
military leaders). We also included names of people who
were not famous to assess whether some subjects would
respond “president” to every name or respond randomly
Downloaded from pss.sagepub.com by John Nestojko on April 19, 2016
Recognizing the Presidents3
(but neither happened). The final list of nonpresidents
included 28 vice presidents and 54 other lures (the full
list can be downloaded from the Open Science Framework, https://osf.io/8z2an/).
Procedure
Subjects consented to the study procedures on their computers and were asked a series of demographic questions. We excluded no subjects on the basis of their
responses to these questions. Following this, subjects
completed the vocabulary subtask of the Shipley (1940)
test as a measure of general knowledge.
Subjects were then given the presidential-recognition
test. They were presented with 123 names, in a random
order and one at a time, and were asked to indicate
whether the individual had served as president by clicking
one of two buttons on the screen, labeled “PRESIDENT”
and “NOT A PRESIDENT.” Next, subjects were asked to
rate their confidence in their decision on a visual scale
ranging from not at all confident to entirely confident. The
scale ranged from 0 to 100, but no numbers were shown—
only the text anchors. The sliding cursor was placed at
zero at the beginning of each confidence rating.
President decisions and confidence ratings were selfpaced, and the 123 names were presented in a new random order for each subject. At the end of the recognition
test, subjects were asked whether they had used any
external sources while completing the study (subjects
were told that there was no penalty for saying yes), and
they were also asked the name of the first president they
remembered as serving in office during their lifetime.
Data analysis did not begin until the final sample had
been collected, although we did monitor data collection
to ensure there were no bugs in the computer program.
The study was programmed with Adobe Flash (Weinstein, 2012). The software program used to conduct the
study can be downloaded from the Open Science Framework. It can be run online or in the lab. Statistical analyses were conducted with JASP (Version 0.7.1; Love et al.,
2015). All variables and conditions are reported here or
in the supplement on the Open Science Framework
(https://osf.io/8z2an/), which also contains additional
methodological details. The study was approved by the
Washington University in St. Louis Institutional Review
Board.
Results
On the whole, subjects showed good performance on the
presidential-recognition task. They were highly likely to
correctly identify presidents (hit rate = .88, 95% confidence interval, or CI = [.86, .89]) and unlikely to falsely
recognize the nonpresidents (false alarm rate = .09, 95%
CI = [.08, .10]). In a previous study (Roediger & DeSoto,
2014), we found that a sample of MTurk subjects recalled
43% of the presidents when they were given a 5-min time
limit. In comparison, subjects in the present study could
recognize many more presidents than subjects in the previous study could typically recall. Nevertheless, hit rates
for presidents correlated with correct recall rates from our
previous study (Roediger & DeSoto, 2014), r(39) = .69, p <
.001, 95% CI = [.49, .82], which suggests that presidents
who are well recalled are also well recognized.
Overall, the proportion of correct responses on the
recognition test (the number of correct responses—hits
and correct rejections—divided by 123) was correlated
with the Shipley score, r(324) = .60, p < .001, 95% CI =
[.53, .67], which shows that presidential-recognition success was positively associated with a subject’s vocabulary
knowledge. It is possible that these correlations would be
higher if not for the ceiling effect in recognition.
False alarm rates were similar for vice presidents (M =
.09, 95% CI = [.08, .10]) and for other nonpresidents (M =
.10, 95% CI = [.08, .11]), paired-samples t(325) = 1.86,
p = .06, 95% CI for the difference = [.00, .01]. This outcome may seem surprising, but we excluded vice presidents who went on to become president, and among the
other famous Americans we included were names that
are probably more familiar to many people than are vice
presidents from distant eras (cf. Patrick Henry as a lure
with Schuyler Colfax, a vice president).
Confidence ratings showed typical patterns for hits
and false alarms. Subjects were confident for hits to presidents (M = 92 of 100 on the confidence scale, 95% CI =
[91, 93]) and much less confident for false alarms to nonpresidents (M = 61, 95% CI = [58, 64]). False alarm confidence was similar for the two types of nonpresidents:
vice presidents (M = 59, 95% CI = [56, 63]) and other lures
(M = 62, 95% CI = [59, 65]), t(223) = 1.30, p = .20, 95% CI
for the difference = [–1, 6] (102 subjects were excluded
from this analysis because they did not falsely recognize
one or both types of lure). Because of the similarity in
false alarm rates and confidence for the two types of
lures, we collapsed across them in further analyses.
Figure 1 shows the proportion of subjects who identified each of the 123 test items as the name of a president
(on the ordinate) and subjects’ average confidence in that
judgment (on the abscissa). Each data point represents
one name (circles for presidents, triangles for nonpresidents). As shown in the figure, those names that were
more likely to be recognized as presidents received
higher confidence ratings, on average, when the judgment of “president” was assigned, r(121) = .95, p < .001,
95% CI = [.93, .97].
On the whole, there was a correlation between recognition accuracy and confidence between items,
r(121) = .48, p < .001, 95% CI = [.34, .61], which shows
Downloaded from pss.sagepub.com by John Nestojko on April 19, 2016
Roediger, DeSoto
4
Presidents
Nonpresidents
Proportion of Subjects Who Responded “President”
1.00
.80
.60
.40
.20
.00
0
20
40
60
80
100
Confidence When Responding “President”
Fig. 1. Scatterplot showing the association between the proportion of subjects who identified each name as that of a president and their average confidence in that identification. Each data point represents a name, and different symbols are used for
presidents and nonpresidents. Alexander Hamilton was the nonpresident outlier.
that targets and lures that received higher confidence ratings were more likely to be correctly categorized. However, the strength of the correlation was quite different
for the two types of items. The correlation between the
hit rate and response confidence for presidents was high,
r(39) = .93, p < .001, 95% CI = [.87, .96], and the correlation between the correct rejection rate and response confidence for nonpresidents was lower, r(80) = .40, p < .001,
95% CI = [.20, .57]. This correlation between confidence
and accuracy is a common pattern (although exceptions
exist to this outcome in other situations; DeSoto &
Roediger, 2014). As we will show, in this study, “deceptive” lures were falsely recognized with high confidence.
These items helped to reduce the positive correlation
between confidence and accuracy for nonpresidents.
Ten presidents were recognized less than 80% of the
time, and even when subjects did recognize them, recognition confidence was relatively lower for these individuals than for other presidents. Chester Arthur (hit rate =
.46, 95% CI = [.40, .51]) was the least recognizable president (95% CIs for hit and false alarm rates were calculated using the Wilson interval; L. D. Brown, Cai, &
DasGupta, 2001). Clearly, using standard recognition
procedures does not enable subjects to correctly recognize all the presidents.
More interesting for theoretical purposes is the false
recognition of famous men who never became president. Alexander Hamilton was falsely recognized at a
remarkably high rate (.71, 95% CI = [.66, .76]), and he
was recognized with high confidence (83, 95% CI = [79,
86]). In fact, Hamilton was identified as a president
more often than two actual presidents: Chester Arthur
(hit rate = .46) and Franklin Pierce (hit rate = .56, 95%
CI = [.51, .62]). Hamilton was identified as a president at
similar rates as Presidents Fillmore, Harrison, Tyler,
Harding, Taylor, Hayes, and Van Buren. Additionally,
confidence when labeling Hamilton as president was
greater than confidence when calling Arthur, Pierce,
Tyler, or either of the Harrisons a president. These high
false alarm rates are surprising when contrasted with
false recall in the large MTurk study reported previously
(Roediger & DeSoto, 2014). Out of 497 subjects tested in
that study, only 24 falsely recalled Hamilton, the same
as with Franklin (for an intrusion proportion of .05).
Thus, a recognition test invites false responding in this
paradigm to a much greater extent than a recall test, as
Downloaded from pss.sagepub.com by John Nestojko on April 19, 2016
Recognizing the Presidents5
is also frequently observed in list-learning experiments
(Roediger & McDermott, 1995).
To establish the reliability of our results, we split our
sample of 326 subjects into two groups of 163 each (using
alphabetical subject-identification codes assigned randomly by the computer program). We then correlated the
mean hit rates and false alarm rates for the two samples.
Pearson correlations were similar in each case—hit rates:
r(39) = .98, p < .001, 95% CI = [.96, .99]; false alarm rates:
r(80) = .97, p < .001, 95% CI = [.96, .98]. Thus, the results
seem quite stable.
Discussion
In the study reported here, a sample of MTurk subjects
recognized 88% of the presidents, which is much higher
than recall of presidents from either MTurk samples or
university students (Roediger & DeSoto, 2014). Still, recognition was far from perfect, and the hit rate for some
presidents who held office in the 1800s was quite poor,
with six of them being recognized 70% of the time or
less. We believe our subjects were trying to do the task
well, because recognition of many presidents was quite
high (Washington, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Kennedy,
Nixon, Bush, and Obama were recognized 99% of the
time, on average). In addition, subjects rarely incorrectly
identified unfamiliar lures as presidents.
The fact that the false alarm rate to so many nonpresidents was so low makes the exceptions all the more
interesting. Jacoby, Kelley, et al. (1989) proposed that
familiarity of a name can be mistaken for the fame of the
individual, but all their work was conducted using lists of
fictitious names that were familiar owing to their recent
presentation in the experiment. We applied their observations to famous people, specifically U.S. presidents and
others of note in American history, thus extending the
study of fame judgments to more natural situations (also
see Muter, 1978).
Hamilton was falsely recognized as president 71% of
the time, and this is likely because of the many important
roles he played, including those of a founding father of
the United States, coauthor of The Federalist Papers, and
Secretary of the Treasury, as well as his duel with Vice
President Aaron Burr. Our survey was conducted in May
2015, 1 month before the announcement that Hamilton’s
image would be replaced on the $10 U.S. currency with
the picture of a woman, and prior to the July 2015 Broadway debut of the musical Hamilton. These developments
in popular culture may heighten familiarity of Hamilton’s
name, but might also lead to recollection of the fact that
he was not president.
Jacoby and his colleagues ( Jacoby, Kelley, et al., 1989;
Jacoby, Woloshyn, & Kelley, 1989) proposed that familiarity leads to false fame only when it is unopposed by
recollection of specific details. Thus, we suggest that the
high rate of false recognition of Hamilton can be interpreted within Jacoby and colleagues’ attributional theory:
Hamilton is a highly familiar name in American history,
and this familiarity is so powerful that he was mistakenly
recognized as president in our study. A complementary
idea arising from false memory research is that familiar
lures can sometimes be rejected via recollection of distinguishing events (e.g., Gallo, 2006; Gallo, Bell, Beier, &
Schacter, 2006; Rotello & Heit, 1999). We suggest that this
recall-to-reject strategy failed in the case of Hamilton
(and a few others). That is, Hamilton is a highly familiar
name, but we suggest that subjects were unable to recollect exactly what his role was; hence, he was falsely recognized as being president.
Other than Hamilton, four other individuals were
falsely recognized as presidents more than 25% of the
time—Hubert Humphrey (false alarm rate = .39, 95% CI =
[.34, .45]), Benjamin Franklin (.39, 95% CI = [.34, .45]),
John Calhoun (.37, 95% CI = [.32, .42]), and Thomas
Moore (.31, 95% CI = [.26, .36]). Why the false familiarity
in these cases? We can only speculate, but the same
framework described for Hamilton can probably be used
for three of these cases. Humphrey served as vice president and ran for president in 1968. Also, the fact that
both his names begin with the letter H may make him
confusable with Herbert Hoover. Franklin was a famous
American involved in the events surrounding the founding of the country, and he served as ambassador to
France. John Calhoun was a senator and vice president
for 7 years. These factors may account for their general
familiarity in American history, but if subjects could not
recollect their roles, then false recognition as president
may have occurred because subjects could not oppose
the familiarity with knowledge of their actual roles. These
accounts of false fame in our recognition task were formulated after the fact, of course, and need to be tested in
additional experiments designed for that purpose.
One surprise is the high false alarm rate for Thomas
Moore. People with this name have served in the U.S.
House of Representatives, but none are famous. Our best
guess is that the Anglo-Saxon structure of his name, the
frequency of both parts of the name, and possibly his
confusability with Sir Thomas More, the counselor to
King Henry VIII, may have contributed to the name’s
familiarity and false recognition.
In determining fame, we suggest that familiarity must
occur in the context of the quality being judged (freefloating familiarity will not do; Elvis Presley will not be
recognized as a president). Thus the individuals (except
for Moore) falsely recognized as president are those with
ties to American history. The same individuals would be
unlikely to be recognized if the task were, say, to recognize famous musicians from the 1960s, as this group does
Downloaded from pss.sagepub.com by John Nestojko on April 19, 2016
Roediger, DeSoto
6
not contain similar historical names (except perhaps for
Paul Revere & the Raiders). Thus, we propose that familiarity is context sensitive; that is, some global familiarity of
a name (say, Winston Churchill) is not enough for it to be
falsely recognized as famous in a specific context (e.g., as
a U.S. president). Creating an appropriate account of such
context-sensitive familiarity must also await future research.
The data as a whole show a strong relation between
the proportion of subjects who identified a name as that
of a president (whether correctly or incorrectly) and subjects’ confidence, on average, in that identification, as
shown in Figure 1 (r = .95). These data fit well with
Koriat’s (2008, 2012) consensuality principle: The more
consensual a judgment (i.e., the more people who make
it), the greater the confidence they tend to have when
making it. Similar observations can be seen in list-learning experiments (DeSoto & Roediger, 2014).
In sum, our study shows that Americans have good
recognition of early and recent presidents, but, confirming studies using recall, some presidents of the 19th century are not recognized well. In fact, several famous
Americans are judged to have been president at the same
or greater levels than actual presidents. We have interpreted the results using Jacoby and colleagues’ ( Jacoby,
Kelley, et al., 1989; Jacoby, Woloshyn, & Kelley, 1989)
attributional framework for recognition, as complemented by Gallo and colleagues’ (Gallo, 2006; Gallo
et al., 2006) recall-to-reject process (see also Rotello &
Heit, 1999). In addition, the results fit well with Koriat’s
(2008, 2012) consensuality principle relating the tendency to correctly recognize a name to the confidence
with which the judgment is made.
Action Editor
D. Stephen Lindsay served as action editor for this article.
Author Contributions
Both authors contributed to the concept and design of the
study. H. L. Roediger, III, led theoretical development, provided project oversight, and guided data interpretation. K. A.
DeSoto was responsible for programming the study, as well as
collecting, analyzing, and interpreting the data. The authors
wrote the manuscript jointly.
Acknowledgments
We thank the Washington University in St. Louis Memory Lab
for feedback and insight, and Katie Greenberg for assistance
with data collection. We thank Brian P. Winters for copyedits.
K. A. DeSoto is now at the Association for Psychological Science in Washington, D.C.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interest with
respect to their authorship or the publication of this article.
Funding
This research was funded by a Collaborative Activity grant from
the James S. McDonnell Foundation.
Open Practices
All data and materials have been made publicly available via
the Open Science Framework and can be accessed at https://
osf.io/8z2an/. The complete Open Practices Disclosure for this
article can be found at http://pss.sagepub.com/content/by/
supplemental-data. This article has received the badges for
Open Data and Open Materials. More information about the
Open Practices badges can be found at https://osf.io/tvyxz/
wiki/1.%20View%20the%20Badges/ and http://pss.sagepub.com/
content/25/1/3.full.
References
Brown, L. D., Cai, T. T., & DasGupta, A. (2001). Interval estimation for a binomial proportion. Statistical Science, 16,
101–133. doi:10.1214/ss/1009213286
Brown, W. (1923). To what extent is memory measured by a
single recall? Journal of Experimental Psychology, 6, 377–
382. doi:10.1037/h0073877
Chandler, J., & Shapiro, D. (2016). Conducting clinical research
using crowdsourced convenience samples. Annual Review
of Clinical Psychology. Advance online publication. doi:
10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-021815-093623
Corning, A., & Schuman, H. (2015). Generations and collective
memory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Crowder, R. G. (1993). Short-term memory: Where do we stand?
Memory & Cognition, 21, 142–145. doi:10.3758/BF03202725
DeSoto, K. A., & Roediger, H. L., III. (2014). Positive and negative correlations between confidence and accuracy for the
same events in recognition of categorized lists. Psychological
Science, 25, 781–788. doi:10.1177/0956797613516149
Fu, M., Xue, Y., DeSoto, K. A., & Yuan, T. (2016). Remembering
the leaders of China. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, Article 373.
doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00373
Gallo, D. A. (2006). Associative illusions of memory: False
memory research in DRM and related tasks. New York, NY:
Psychology Press.
Gallo, D. A., Bell, D. M., Beier, J. S., & Schacter, D. L. (2006).
Two types of recollection-based monitoring in younger and
older adults: Recall-to-reject and the distinctiveness heuristic. Memory, 14, 730–741. doi:10.1080/09658210600648506
Healy, A. F., Havas, D. A., & Parker, J. T. (2000). Comparing
serial position effects in semantic and episodic memory
using reconstruction of order tasks. Journal of Memory and
Language, 42, 147–167. doi:10.1006/jmla.1999.2671
Healy, A. F., & Parker, J. T. (2001). Serial position effects in semantic memory: Reconstructing the order of U.S. presidents and
vice presidents. In H. L. Roediger, III, J. S. Nairne, I. Neath,
& A. M. Surprenant (Eds.), The nature of remembering:
Essays in honor of Robert G. Crowder (pp. 171–188). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. doi:10
.1037/10394-009
Downloaded from pss.sagepub.com by John Nestojko on April 19, 2016
Recognizing the Presidents7
Hirst, W., & Manier, D. (2008). Towards a psychology of
collective memory. Memory, 16, 183–200. doi:10.1080/
09658210701811912
Jacoby, L. J., Kelley, C., Brown, J., & Jasechko, J. (1989).
Becoming famous overnight: Limits on the ability to avoid
unconscious influences of the past. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 56, 326–338. doi:10.1037/00223514.56.3.326
Jacoby, L. J., Woloshyn, V., & Kelley, C. (1989). Becoming
famous without being recognized: Unconscious influences of memory produced by dividing attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 118, 115–125.
doi:10.1037/0096-3445.118.2.115
Kelley, M. R., Neath, I., & Surprenant, A. M. (2013). Three more
semantic serial position functions and a SIMPLE explanation. Memory & Cognition, 41, 600–610. doi:10.3758/
s13421-012-0286-1
Koriat, A. (2008). Subjective confidence in one’s answers:
The consensuality principle. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34, 945–959.
doi:10.1037/0278-7393.34.4.945
Koriat, A. (2012). The self-consistency model of subjective confidence. Psychological Review, 119, 80–113. doi:10.1037/
a0025648
Love, J., Selker, R., Marsman, M., Jamil, T., Dropmann, D.,
Verhagen, A. J., . . . Wagenmakers, E.-J. (2015). JASP
(Version 0.7.1) [Computer software]. Retrieved from https://
jasp-stats.org/download/
Murdock, B. B., Jr. (1968). Modality effects in short-term
memory: Storage or retrieval? Journal of Experimental
Psychology, 77, 79–86. doi:10.1037/h0025786
Muter, P. (1978). Recognition failure of recallable words in semantic memory. Memory & Cognition, 6, 9–12. doi:10.3758/
BF03197422
Neath, I. (2010). Evidence for similar principles in episodic and
semantic memory: The presidential serial position function.
Memory & Cognition, 38, 659–666. doi:10.3758/MC.38.5.659
Olick, J. K., & Robbins, S. (1998). Social memory studies: From
“collective memory” to the historical sociology of mnemonic practices. Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 105–140.
doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.24.1.105
Roediger, H. L., III, & Abel, M. (2015). Collective memory: A
new arena of cognitive study. Trends in Cognitive Sciences,
19, 359–361. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2015.04.003
Roediger, H. L., III, & Crowder, R. G. (1976). A serial position effect in recall of United States presidents. Bulletin
of the Psychonomic Society, 8, 275–278. doi:10.3758/
BF03335138
Roediger, H. L., III, & DeSoto, K. A. (2014). Forgetting the
presidents. Science, 346, 1106–1109. doi:10.1126/science
.1259627
Roediger, H. L., III, & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false
memories: Remembering words not presented in lists.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
Cognition, 21, 803–814. doi:10.1037/0278-7393.21.4.803
Rotello, C. M., & Heit, E. (1999). Two-process models of recognition memory: Evidence for recall-to-reject? Journal of Memory
and Language, 40, 432–453. doi:10.1006/jmla.1998.2623
Rubin, D. C. (1998). Knowledge and judgments about events
that occurred prior to birth: The measurement of the persistence of information. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 5,
397–400. doi:10.3758/BF03208816
Rubin, D. C. (2014). How quickly we forget. Science, 346,
1058–1059. doi:10.1126/science.1259627
Schwartz, B. (1991). Social change and collective memory:
The democratization of George Washington. American
Sociological Review, 56, 221–236. doi:10.2307/2095781
Schwartz, B. (1997). Collective memory and history: How Abraham Lincoln became a symbol of racial equality. The Sociological Quarterly, 38, 469–496. doi:10.1111/j.1533-8525.1997
.tb00488.x
Shipley, W. C. (1940). A self-administering scale for measuring
intellectual impairment and deterioration. The Journal of
Psychology, 9, 371–377. doi:10.1080/00223980.1940.9917704
Tulving, E., & Pearlstone, Z. (1966). Availability versus accessibility of information in memory for words. Journal of Verbal
Learning and Verbal Behavior, 5, 381–391. doi:10.1016/
S0022-5371(66)80048-8
Tulving, E., & Thomson, D. M. (1973). Encoding specificity
and retrieval processes in episodic memory. Psychological
Review, 80, 352–373. doi:10.1037/h0020071
Weinstein, Y. (2012). Flash programming for the social and
behavioral sciences: A sophisticated guide to online surveys
and experiments. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Wertsch, J. V., & Roediger, H. L., III. (2008). Collective memory: Conceptual foundations and theoretical approaches.
Memory, 16, 318–326. doi:10.1080/09658210701801434
Downloaded from pss.sagepub.com by John Nestojko on April 19, 2016